FROM AN ENGRAVING BY G. VERTUE
Soon after the death of his brother, Thomas, Somerset began to totter. The Admiral’s execution had produced a bad effect. Hardened as men were in those ferocious times, there were yet certain ties of consanguinity which might not be violated with impunity; and so, although Elizabeth did write to her sister Mary, that “had the brothers met, the Lord Admiral would have been saved,” it was none the less the hand of Cain that signed his death-warrant. The people said so openly. They had not forgotten the dreadful carnage that had marked Edward Seymour’s return, through Scotland into England, on the occasion of his first Scotch expedition.[160]
If the horrors perpetrated by Somerset himself during that expedition were execrable, those committed with his knowledge and connivance in the same forlorn country under Edward VI were even more atrocious. That “varmint” Lennox, the husband of the Lady Margaret, niece of Henry VIII, was his chief agent. Reeking corpses of men, women, and little children marked the passage of the English troops to and from the Border lands. Thus the Lord Protector’s reputation in the North was of the worst—“his very name stank of blood.”[161]
Dudley had not, therefore, so much difficulty as might be thought in undermining his formidable rival’s position, towering though it was. In many ways, Somerset had proved himself a failure, and he had already lost much of his popularity, even among Protestants, who were none too sure of his loyalty—was he not the friend of Mary and the avowed enemy of Elizabeth? By the large Catholic party he was, of course, entirely and heartily detested.
He was not a Calvinist, although he maintained an active correspondence with Calvin, but a Church of England man of the “Low Church” description, a hater of ecclesiastical ritual and formality, and, incidentally, a born iconoclast. The statement that no man or woman was persecuted or burnt for religious opinions under his rule, is hardly exact. There are more ways than one of killing a dog—or of persecuting an opposing faith. True, the fires of Smithfield were quenched for the time being, but Catholics and Anabaptists were made to feel they were outside the law, and the prisons were crowded with men and women of those persuasions, and of every social grade.[162] The cathedrals and parish churches were cleared of their sacred images, their plate, their rood-lofts, and their art treasures; even their frescoed walls were whitewashed. Stained glass was smashed, because it bore “idolatrous pictures,” and replaced by plain glass or horn. Even dead men’s tombs were overthrown, and the bodies cast “into filthy ditches and fields beyond the city.”[163] In a word, the artistic treasures of centuries were within a few months dispersed, destroyed, or sold to a throng of Jews, who flocked to England to seize so splendid an opportunity. Somerset pulled down three or four episcopal palaces, the beautiful North Cloister of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Churches of St. Mary-le-Strand and St. John’s, Clerkenwell, for the sake of their building materials, which he used for his own new and almost royal residence in the Strand. He gave orders for the demolition of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, and but for the angry protests of the indignant parishioners, his command would have been obeyed. There was another cause of discontent, which has been much neglected by historians, namely, the doctrinal changes, which necessarily greatly altered outward observances, much to the disgust of the older generation, who saw the destruction of the cherished traditions of a thousand years, and the desecration of their most sacred social usages. Their pageants, pilgrimages, and processions were now paralysed; and it was an offence deemed worthy of imprisonment, ay, even of burning, to pray for the dead, or to retain the rosary the dying mother had given, with her last blessing, on her death-bed.
The average Englishman is apt to think of the Sixth Edward’s reign as an era of peace and plenty, during which, to the applause of the entire nation, the Book of Common Prayer was formulated by Cranmer, and the churches emptied of “hated and idolatrous images and symbols.” In reality, it was one of the most disastrous epochs in the whole of our history. Froude, in a passage of uncommon brilliance, sums up the appalling effect, after a lapse of fifteen years, of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and hospitals. With singular vividness he depicts the extreme misery to which the lower orders were reduced; the high roads and country lanes rendered dangerous by hordes of starving and half-naked men and women, who a few years previously had been in fairly comfortable circumstances, earning a living wage from the now banished masters of abbeys and priories. Now the poor wretches roved in fear and trembling, begging food and shelter; or, driven desperate by want, committing deeds of violence. Dr. Latimer, in his Royal Sermons, puts his unfailing finger on the right spot when he remarks that “the misery the people were enduring was entirely due to the new order of things. My father,” he continues, “was a yeoman who lived comfortably, educated his children, served the King, and gave to the poor, on a farm the rent of which has been increased fourfold since, so that his successor in the farm has become a pauper in consequence.” Then, turning upon the Seymours, the Pagets, and others of their kind, who had enriched themselves out of the ecclesiastical spoils, he thundered: “I fully certify you as extortioners, violent oppressors, engrossers of tenements and lands, through whose covetousness villages decay and fall down; and the King’s liege people, for lack of sustenance, are famished and decayed.... You landlords, you rent-raisers, I may say, you step-lords, you unnatural lords, you have for your possessions yearly too much! The farm that was some years back from £20 to £40 by the year, is now charged to tenants at from £50 to £100.... Poor men cannot have a living, all kinds of victuals are so dear. I think, verily, that if it thus continue, we shall at length be obliged to pay twenty shillings for a pig. If ye bring it to a pass the yeomen be not able to put their sons to school, ye pluck salvation from the people, and utterly destroy the realm.”... “In those days,” he says in another sermon, “they [the monks] helped the scholars. They maintained and gave them living. It is a pitiful thing to see schools so neglected; every true Christian ought to lament the same. To consider what has been plucked from abbeys, colleges, chantries, it is a marvel that no more is bestowed upon this holy office of salvation.... Scholars have no exhibition. Very few there be who help poor scholars, or set children to school to learn the Word of God, and make provision for the age to come. It would pity a man’s heart to hear what I have of the state of Cambridge.... I think there be at this day [1550] one thousand students less than were within twenty years, and fewer preachers.”
The enclosure, too, by their new owners, of the vast tracts of lands, which had formerly belonged to the abbeys and priories, for the purpose of cattle rearing, instead of corn growing—as hitherto—(wool being at a premium) had thrown thousands of agricultural labourers out of employment; and soon the large cities, London, Bristol, and York, were crowded with poor creatures seeking work, only to meet with flat refusal from the citizens, who were angered and alarmed by so considerable an addition to that pauper population whose hapless descendants still form the bulk of the very appropriately styled “Submerged Tenth” of our times. This rapid increase of an undesirable class soon resulted in a marked debasement of the lowest orders, and so bad did the state of morals in the capital become, that Ridley, Bishop of London, preached more than one sermon on the subject, and, in a book entitled The Lamentation of England, gives a hideous picture of the rising tide of “immorality, crime, drunkenness, hatred and scorn of religion and its ministers amongst the people.” Domestic chastity was held at a discount and reviled, and adultery was so common, even in the highest ranks, that the Privy Council spoke of bringing the question of prohibitive measures before Parliament. The Protector himself had set aside his first wife, Catherine Ffoliot, although she had borne him a son, on no valid pretext, legal or otherwise, in order to marry the higher born Anne Stanhope—the temper of this Stanhope lady was so peppery that he went in fear and trembling, and this led his contemporaries to say “he had got rid of a dove to saddle himself with a scorpion.” Henry, son of William, Earl of Pembroke, divorced Katherine, daughter of Henry, Duke of Suffolk (Lady Jane’s younger sister), to marry Mary, daughter of Sir Henry Sydney. The Earl of Northampton, Katherine Parr’s brother, divorced Anne, daughter of the Earl of Essex, when he married Lord Cobham’s daughter Elizabeth. Even Lady Jane Grey’s own legitimacy was disputed; and the matrimonial adventures of her grandfather Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, have already been mentioned.
The wickedness of the upper classes[164] spread downwards, and, coupled with intense poverty, made “London worse than Babylon of old.”
Well might honest old Latimer cry out to the King, in one of his most interesting sermons (preached in 1550 at Paul’s Cross), “For the love of God take an order for marriage here in England.” Cecil also protests against the prevailing looseness of morals: “Sacrilegious avarice ravenously invaded Church livings, colleges, chantries, hospitals, and places dedicated to the poor, as things superfluous. Ambition and emulation among the nobility, presumption and disobedience among the common people, grew so extravagant, that England seemed to be in a downright frenzy.” Hear Bishop Burnet also on the same subject: “This gross and insatiable scramble after the goods and wealth that had been dedicated to good designs, without applying any part of it to promote the good of the Gospel, and the instruction of the poor, made all people conclude that it was for robbery and not for reformation that their zeal made them so active. The irregular and immoral lives of many of the professors of the Gospel gave their enemies great advantage to say that they ran away from confession, penance, fasting, and prayer, only to be under no restraint, and to indulge themselves in a licentious and dissolute course of life. By these things, that were but too visible in some of the most eminent among them, the people were much alienated from them; and as much as they were formerly against Popery, they grew to have kinder thoughts of it, and to look on all the changes that had been made, as designs to enrich some vicious characters, and to let in an inundation of vice and wickedness upon the nation.” To stem this rising tide would have been a task for a great statesman; Somerset was not a great statesman, for, though many of his intentions were good, his methods were primitively violent. He thought himself capable of repressing the inevitable result of the evil wrought by Henry VIII and his followers by force of arms, and by laws which, even in those days, chilled men with horror. To put down the vagabondage in the country districts,—a consequence of the disbanding of the great crowd of abbey retainers,—he signed a decree whereby “Any man or woman found suspiciously near any house, or wandering by the highways, or in the streets of any city, town, or village, for three days together, without offering to work, or running away from their labour, may be brought by the master, or any other person, before two justices of the peace [these] having the power of the statute law to exercise the said power by burning into his or her breast with a hot iron the letter V, and to adjudge him or her to be the slave of the informer, to have and to hold the said slave to him, his executors or assigns, for the space of two years, only giving the said slave bread and water.” The “slave” was to be made to work by blows or chains. In the event of his disappearing for the space of fourteen days without leave, he could be punished by chaining up and beating, “and if he [the owner of the slave] chose to prove the fault by two witnesses before the justices, they shall cause such slave to be marked on the forehead, or the ball of the cheek with a hot iron, with the sign of an S, that he may be known for a loiterer, and [the justices] shall adjudge the runaway to be the said master’s slave for ever.” The penalty of a second escape from slavery was death by hanging “from the nearest tree, if violent.” Any one was permitted to take children between five and fourteen years of age from any wanderer, whether they were willing or not, and if the child ran away from his master the latter had the power “to keep and punish the said child in chains, or otherwise, and use him or her as his slave in all points,” up to the age of twenty at least. The master of a grown-up slave had the right, under section 4 of this law, “To let, set forth, sell, bequeath, or give the service of such slaves to any person or persons, whatsoever.” The law further empowered an owner of slaves “to put a ring of iron about his neck, arm, or leg, for a better knowledge and surety of keeping him.” Aiding a slave to escape was punished by the forfeiture of ten pounds by the person so doing. These and other evils too numerous to detail helped to fan the flame of popular discontent.
Presently the counties began to rise, the people of Devonshire and Cornwall flew to arms to vindicate the rights of conscience. They would have back the religion which their forefathers had held for a thousand years. They demanded that the “Six Articles” should be put in force. The men of Cornwall refused the Book of Common Prayer, because, they alleged, they could not speak English, and could not understand it, while they were accustomed to the Latin Mass, which they had been trained from infancy to comprehend. Down into the West went Lord Russell (“Swearing Russell”), dispatched by the Lord Protector. He behaved “more like a wild beast than a human being”—as abominably as Lennox in Scotland. Hooper, who went with him to preach to the rebels, describes his massacres as “the most horrible butcheries of brave men that ever did happen in this world.” Russell’s dispatches do not in any way minimise the horrors he perpetrated, and “our men,” he says, “are daily supplied with large numbers of sheep and fowl from the places where the farmers and squires forfeited such property by their obstinate adherence to the Popish Mass, and other superstitions.” Some three thousand men and several hundreds of women are said to have suffered death in the fight for freedom of conscience in Devonshire. The central counties rose too, and there were terrible riots in Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Derbyshire, and Huntingdonshire.